Year: 2008

OK, so you’ve past the point of deciding whether or not you will use an IoC container. Then you find out that is just the beginning of the road. How does that container fit in your application design? Should you pass it around, should you have a static accessor, or should all your components be…

In our last drop of MEF, one of the significant changes was the introduction of the ExportProvider. In this next series of posts, we’ll take an in-depth look at what it is, how it’s used by the CompositionContainer, and how you can use it to customize the behavior of the container. Disclaimer: These are not…

This post is long overdue, but if you hadn’t heard, my bosses Brad Abrams and Krzysztof Cwalina (pronounced Kris-toff Tzvalyna [thanks to Monika Dyrda for the transliteration]) recently completed V2 of the renowned Framework Guidelines book. What’s New in the 2nd edition? Updated with new features from .NET Framework 3.0 and 3.5 Tons of new annotations from industry…

Recently we were fortunate to have Nicholas Blumhardt join the MEF team. Before joining Microsoft, Nick was a busy man building enterprise software solutions, including developing Autofac, one of the popular IoC containers. Nick is very passionate about incorporating software design patterns and principles (S.O.L.I.D.) in order to build maintainable software. He’s also passionate about…

Lots of posts on Oxite. I won’t reiterate what they’ve said, though Rob Conery has done a great analysis here. I’ll just share my own quick brutally honest thoughts. There is no excuse for this. There are tons of folks both internal to Microsoft or external that can help people who want to learn good…

Recently I have been doing a bunch of podcasts on MEF. Previously I had done a few with Hearding Code and Elegant Code. Back in the Hearding code days I was very new to the team and still trying to figure out exactly what MEF was about. Since then, we’ve gotten much more crisp about…

Matt Hawley has a nice set of posts where he explores a method to extend MEF to allow custom activated exports. MEF + Factories MEF + Factories Using an Export Provider Matt’s scenario involves exporting a set of WCF proxies. WCF proxies can’t simply be instantiated through the constructor, so he needed a way to…

We just dropped another release of MEF source. This one includes some significant changes that we’re excited about. 1. We’re now completely MS-PL!!! The StructuredValues dll dependency is now removed. Your free to use the source how you like on Windows and beyond. 2. Container re-factoring – We’ve done an overhaul of the composition container….

Following in Oren’s suit, I wanted to let everyone know that Øredev is one awesome conference, and I am having a real blast! If you know me, then you know I am usually really bad about blogging about conferences I attend. I already have a backlog that includes PDC, Kaizen and the p&p summit. Why…